what?
I mean —
I know what you mean. Hell, you sure know how to treat a man on his night off. Thanks for reminding me why I got divorced. At least I have that to feel good about.
Who are you evaluating for scholarships? Justin asked, his voice raw again.
Most likely Sediqa.
Idris’s English is perfect. He’s taken every class here. And he —
I’ll tell you what he did. He told you his story. That he runs all my errands and —
Are you educating people or training drivers?
We’ve got a tight budget. He’s studying here for free —
So are the girls.
They’re catching up from a lifetime of being held back. Frank waved his battered glasses. The only way to change the world is to find those who want to change themselves. You can inspire people, but you can’t fix them. Right now, my priority is female role models. Inspiration for the girls. As for Idris, you’ll see — it’s not the men who are ready to change.
Justin pressed on, arguing that he was the academic director now and should have a say in who received the scholarship.
Fine then, Frank said, and he almost seemed to smile. I’ll give you the list of scholarship candidates and their situations, and you can choose the most deserving person.
Justin was so startled by the sudden concession that it took him a moment to agree. Frank tipped his head forward, the way a king might, granting permission to leave.
Justin went downstairs, outside into the driveway where the Corolla was parked, and let himself out the metal door, into the street. The cold circled his wrists and throat. Here and there, the lights in compounds radiated up — luminous pedestals lifting the dull mass of the sky.
His exultation instilled him with courage. He took a step, the mud squelching. He paused, listened, took two steps, then three. He was moving the way a reptile or a rat might: stopping to take stock of danger. He reached the end of the lane. Far away, on the unfinished highway, passing vehicles lifted dust that rose in the breeze and fell like a slow surf. The bulk of the city lay beyond, its radiance amplified in the particulate air.
He’d known that a new beginning wouldn’t be easy, but now he felt confident. It was time to make peace.
He held his phone, its LCD a dingy jewel. His thumb lingered over the call button. He composed a text instead.
Clay, this is Justin Falker. I’m in Kabul. Your mother gave me your number. Let me know if you’re free to meet.
LOUISIANA: DECEMBER 1999–NOVEMBER 2001
JUSTIN
THE FIRST TIME he heard about the family, he had an impression of a story from his English class or something he’d seen on TV, about desperate, wandering people, and he was surprised that such characters might actually exist.
They’ve been living in a motel near the overpass, his father said. The brown one. Right after the exit ramp. They spent Christmas there. I told them they can move in on the first.
Justin was reading on the couch, and in the kitchen, his mother asked, Why not sooner? The carriage house is empty.
I’ve no inclination to rent to desperate people, his father replied. If they can’t wait three days, they’re not the right tenants.
That evening, Justin and his friends rollerbladed along the lakeshore’s wide concrete path, racing, picking up speed, and then slowing to catch their breath. As they started back, Justin hesitated.
A white teenage boy stood on the shore with the black fishermen, watching where their lines disappeared against the water. His shoulder muscles ridged a threadbare T-shirt, his arms veined like a man’s. His ratty clothes weren’t jock or prep or even redneck. Justin’s friends glanced over too — the girls a little longer.
On New Year’s Eve, Justin went to a party, squeezing into the packed car of Adam McCaskill, who’d just gotten his license. Though Justin didn’t drink, most of his friends did, and not long after arriving at Douglas Breaux’s house, they were wasted and hollering about the millennium. When a girl told Justin that her older brother was on a retreat in the woods, purifying himself for the Second Coming, he asked why she hadn’t gone with him. She said she believed in Christ already and would be taken to heaven. Not tonight, she specified. The millennium is off by like a few months. The Rapture will probably happen in March.
He realized then that she’d never kiss him, and it was already too late to pair up with another girl, so he called his father for a ride home.
The next morning a small U-Haul truck and battered gray Ford sedan pulled into his driveway and past the garage, behind the hedges to the parking area next to the carriage house. Justin ate his cereal at the window as a lanky man unloaded the U-Haul, his face so full of harrowed lines that his forehead, cheeks, and mouth resembled a series of descending brackets.
A girl got out of the sedan. She looked young enough to go to his school, but like a TV star: dark bangs and shoulder-length hair, a black trench coat belted at the waist. The tall boy from the lakeside loped past her, his shoulders curved as if he might pounce.
Don’t eat standing up, Justin’s father said. He’d come downstairs in his golf clothes, his shirt tight across the chest, his big bones and residual muscle making his body seem lumpy.
Justin sat back down at the table, angled toward the window.
They won’t be here long, his father said. People like that, they’re running away from something.
Why did you rent to them?
It’s hard to find a renter in the middle of the school year, and they didn’t tell me they had a boy. But now I’m seeing the situation clearly, and I have no doubt they’ll be gone before we know it. Just keep your distance. There’s no point making friends.
His father normally rented to graduate students from McNeese State, but the girl who’d lived there had dropped out and moved home, leaving a rhyming handwritten note on the door. He’d ranted about the kind of person who absconds and apologizes with poetry.
He went into the garage. As the door mechanically rose and the Lincoln started up, Justin returned to the window, cradling his cereal bowl.
The carriage house was tiny, just a bathroom, an alcove kitchen, and a single room partially divided by shelves. His father was right. The family would soon be gone.
As the boy came out and walked down the driveway, Justin went to the living room and stood just inside the drapes. The boy stopped at the street. He was now visible in profile, and far bigger than he’d appeared leaning on the railing at the lake.
Justin didn’t think he’d ever seen someone so still — the way he pictured the first woodsmen in America. His friends twitched with energy, rolling their ankles to stand on the edges of their feet or popping their knees in and out. This boy stood like an animal listening in a forest. He set off down the street.
Justin went to his room and read a chapter in a World War II memoir his father had given him for Christmas, his head propped on a pillow so he could look outside each time the screen door clapped.
The lanky man and the girl left with both vehicles and came back in a sedan. The man was so tall he had to stoop to go in the carriage house. The girl wasn’t wearing her jacket, only a black tank top and jeans. Justin put his book down and crouched at the windowsill.
She had tattoos on her shoulders and on the inside of her wrist. There was